SCHOOL BOARD CHIEF BOOSTS THE BASICS

John Kass and Jacquelyn Heard, Tribune Staff WritersCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Outlining a "no baloney" approach to reverse years of substandard education in Chicago's public schools, board President Gery Chico on Thursday said that he will implement a basic curriculum and begin yearly performance testing of students, starting in kindergarten.

He said the catalyst for his plan was a newspaper article that detailed how even exemplary students can leave city schools ill-equipped for college or the workforce.

Two honors graduates from Orr High School failed an easy entrance exam for the city college system. The twin girls later learned they were reading below the 6th-grade level.

"You can call it `no baloney' or whatever you want," Chico said during the taping of WMAQ-AM's "The Reporters," which will air at 9 a.m. Sunday. "Our focus has to be that when the kids leave 12th grade they can do what they're supposed to do. Not like those two girls . . . They got straight A's. They were honor students. Only to be told they couldn't read or write . . . The tests they were taking didn't work."

Chico's emphasis on standardized tests and basic education marks a public rejection of the trend popularized in the last decade of boosting students' self-esteem but failing to strengthen their basic skills.

And it also signals a growing rift in the city's public education establishment.

After using special state legislation to defeat the unions, contractors and patronage workers who controlled public education for decades, the next fight is to determine what happens in the classroom.

On one side are Chico, schools Chief Executive Officer Paul Vallas and, importantly, Mayor Richard Daley, who all support standardized tests to evaluate student and teacher performance.

On the other side are school reformers and two University of Chicago academics, John Easton and Anthony Bryk, who oversee the department of Student Assessment and Accountability.

Under their leadership, the schools have stressed performance-based assessments, which focus on how well students apply what they learn rather than whether they meet districtwide academic goals.

The current testing method failed the Orr honors graduates, Karen and Sharon Franklin, and hundreds, if not thousands, of others, Chico said.

Meanwhile, what has gone on behind the scenes has amounted to guerrilla warfare, with city school testing experts bucking the new approach as the MacArthur Foundation gets ready to offer a $3.2 million grant to study the kind of testing Chico wants.

"You don't compel a (person) to lose weight by weighing him more often. You take the information off the scale and use it to devise different strategies that will result in him losing weight," said William Rice, director of research for the city schools.

"With students, you take the results you get from tests and use it to determine changes you need to make in curriculum."

At the radio taping, Chico said the board's Pershing Road headquarters, which costs $11 million to operate, will be vacated within a year and possibly relocatd to the Near West Side Homan Square neighborhood. He also said that school leaders plan to challenge the 1980 federal desegregation court decree, which requires racial quotas for teachers and the use of $40 million for desegregation busing in a system that is only 11 percent white.

School officials confirmed that the move to eliminate desegregation efforts has been discussed with the U.S. Justice Department. And an audit is under way of the travel, restaurant, entertainment and other expenses of the local desegregation monitoring commission.

Charles Mingo, principal of DuSable High School on the South Side, has called for an end to the desegregation decree, saying that while it made sense in the 1960s, it makes little sense for a system that is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.

"We could use that money in our schools, that's $400 million over 10 years," Mingo said. "And we've got to get rid of the teacher racial quotas. It just doesn't work anymore."

Chico's core curriculum could have the most impact on how children learn in Chicago.

The curriculum stresses the basics. Reading, writing, math, spelling, science, geography and history. He wants students to be able to diagram sentences by 4th and 5th grades. He wants an end to "creative spelling." And he wants yearly performance testing of core subjects so that the school system can measure a student's progress.

Those students who do not measure up will be held back and required to take summer school, intensive remediation programs and sessions in soon-to-be announced special charter schools to bring them up to grade.

"Now a lot of people are going to complain that this doesn't include dancing, it doesn't include art with your hands," Chico said during the taping. "I'm not saying it can't include that . . . I don't care if people stress pizzamaking, as long as the children can read, write, spell, do geography, science and history at the appropriate level."